Few Rolling Stones songs have as confounding and controversial an origin story as ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’. The beloved 1968 single was a return to form for the band’s riff-rock sound after heightened experimental psychedelic music that dominated their style in the previous two years. Comparatively, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ was lean, mean, and pure rock and roll, with no fuss or fat to be found.
It’s also a rare case of a Rolling Stones song where all five members at least have some credible claim to creating the track. In the band’s early days, they used the credit ‘Nanker Phelge’ for songs where all five members were given songwriting credit. By the end of the 1960s, the songwriting partnership between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had fully taken over. According to Richards, it was the two of them hanging out one day that led to the song’s writing.
“Mick and I were in my house in England in the country… and we’d been up all night and it was 6:30 in the morning, a dismal day, you know, English, grey,” Richards remembered in 2003. “And we were just both crashing, Mick was on the couch and I was in an armchair with a guitar and we were, like, on the verge. And suddenly this sound of these boots went by the window, clump clump clump – really, I mean, you had to be there to hear it – and woke Mick up, ‘What was that?’”
“‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ comes from this guy Jack Dyer, who was my gardener,” Richards also recalled in 1997. “He’d lived out in the country all his life. I’ll put it this way: Jack Dyer, an old English yokel… Mick says, ‘Flash.’ He’d just woken up. And suddenly we had this wonderful alliterative phrase. So he woke up and we knocked it together. And the only guitar in the house was tuned that way. It’s really ‘Satisfaction’ in reverse. Almost an interchangeable riff, except it’s played on chords instead of a Gibson Maestro Fuzztone.”
But Richards’ recollection that he and Jagger composed the song together goes against how bassist Bill Wyman recalls the song’s origin. According to Wyman, it was actually him and the other two Stones – Brian Jones and Charlie Watts – who got the song going when Jagger and Richards swooped in at the end.
“We got to the studio early once and… in fact, I think it was a rehearsal studio, I don’t think it was a recording studio,” Wyman explained in 1982. “And there was just myself, Brian and Charlie – the Stones NEVER arrive at the same time, you know – and Mick and Keith hadn’t come. And I was just messing about and I just sat down at the piano and started doing this riff, da-daw, da-da-daw, da-da-daw… and then Brian played a bit of guitar and Charlie was doing a rhythm.”
“We were just messing with it for 20 minutes, just filling in time, and Mick and Keith came in and we stopped and they said, ‘Hey, that sounded really good, carry on, what is it?’ ‘Oh, that was just something we were messing with.’ ‘That sounds good,’” Wyman also recalled. “And then the next day all I can really remember… we recorded it and Mick wrote great lyrics to it and it turned out to be a really good single.”
Wyman would reiterate his claims of authorship in his autobiographies Stone Alone and Rolling with the Stones. Despite this assertion, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ was ultimately credited to Jagger/Richards, with Richards frequently comparing the song back to ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.
“I love ‘Satisfaction’ dearly and everything, but those chords are pretty much a de rigueur course as far as songwriting goes,” Richards wrote in his 2010 autobiography Life. “But ‘Flash’ is particularly interesting. It’s allllll right now. It’s almost Arabic or very old, archaic, classical, the chord setups you could only hear in Gregorian chants or something like that. And it’s that weird mixture of your actual rock and roll and at the same time this weird echo of very, very ancient music that you don’t even know. It’s much older than I am, and that’s unbelievable! It’s like a recall of something, and I don’t know where it came from.”
